Santa Elena farm in Argentina was purchased by a Soros company to covert to soy production. Photo by andrea sf. Used under Creative Commons license.

Hedge fund billionaire George Soros made a fortune betting against the British pound in 1992 and was accused of doing the same against the Thai baht and the Malaysian ringitt in 1997. Today Soros is making a killing buying and selling farmland in South America after converting them to biofuel production. While this has caused the land prices to increase dramatically, the ecological impact is questionable.

Adecoagro, an agribusiness company based in Brazil, was created in 2002 to invest in biofuels, coffee, cotton, dairy, grain and sugar production in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. Over the last decade, the company has amassed 283,000 hectares in land which it is now slowly selling off as the price of the land rises. All told the company has now made $132 million from selling farmland and calculates that it has made over 30 percent a year for its investors.

Likewise, last August Adecoagro sold its San Jose farm in Sante Fe, Argentina, for $1,212 per hectare, a 14 fold gain over the $85 it paid per hectare in 2002. The company claims that the value of the land has risen as a result of better management of the San Jose farm. "Agecoagro implemented a sustainable production model that allowed it to grow row crops over six percent of the farm and to increase the productivity of the pastures used for cattle grazing," it said in a statement.

The question remains: was this the only reason the value increased? Well, it appears that the conversion of cattle ranches into soybean farms has also helped increase prices because of the skyrocketing demand for the crop for the purpose of producing biofuels.

The planting of soy – together with palm and jatropha – has boomed around the world in the last decade because of generous subsidies from governments in Europe and North America who want industry to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels like coal and petroleum in order to meet international obligations to mitigate global warming under the Climate Change convention.